Monday, October 12, 2015

Recalling Defense of Kazan in 1552, Tatars Call for Restoration of Republic’s State Sovereignty

Paul
Goble

Staunton, October 12 --Yesterday,
the All-Tatar Social Center organized a demonstration in Kazan in honor of
those who defended that city against Ivan Grozny in 1552 and used the occasion
to demand the restoration of the republic’s state sovereignty and an end to
repression of Tatar activists and political prisoners.

The Center has been holding such
October meetings every year since perestroika times, and although the number of
participants now is far fewer than it was in the early 1990s, the complaints of
those taking part and their demands have remained consistent and directed
toward freedom and independence for Tatarstan (novayagazeta.ru/news/1697182.html).

Participants spoke
about the Tatar’s loss of state sovereignty in recent years, about the inability
of Tatars to be educated in their national language, the persecution of Tatars
under the pretext of fighting Islamist radicalism, and the imperial aspirations
of Moscow from the 16th century to the present day.

They called for the republic’s State
Council to restore to the republic’s constitution its earlier declarations
about the state sovereignty of Tatarstan and about its status as a subject of
international law.Both these provisions
were removed over the last decade at the insistent of Vladimir Putin’s regime.

Those who were able to attend
complained that several of the leading activists, including Fauziya Bayramova
and Aydar Khalim, were prevented from attending by the police who stopped their
car on the pretext of preventing extremism and so delayed it that they were
unable to reach Kazan in time. Bayramova was able to speak to the crowd via
telephone.

In an another act illustrating the
way in which the Tatarstan authorities have been forced to restrict this
demonstration, participants this year were not able to march to the walls of
the Kazan kremlin as a group.Instead,
they had to walk there separately and lay flowers at the site independently
rather than as a group.

Both the restrictions in Kazan and
this enthusiasm in Ukraine sparked objections from some Russian nationalists
who suggested that no one “needs such ‘a day of memory’ in Kazan and accused
participants of being the worst form of the current recrudescence of what they
called “bourgeois nationalism” (forum-msk.org/material/news/11026028.html).